I missed the beginning of this thread so my comments may be off topic, but as a student games developer the subject of Assembler comes up occasionally. My advice is to avoid it like the plague but still be aware of your architecture's quirks and traits. Eg, a PlayStation 2 cache miss costs you 50 cpu cycles. Lesson, don't scatter your data all over RAM. :) Word alignment is important in languages like C too. Eg, struct stuff { char x; int y; char z; }; will probably use more memory on a 32bit chip than: struct smallerstuff { char x; char z; int y; }; This being due to compiles word aligning data by default. The top struct turns into: struct stuff { char x; // three bytes of padding int y; char z; // three bytes of padding }; The smallerstuff struct however should only have 2 bytes of padding after the 2nd char. You can force most compilers to pack the bits of a struct into the smallest possible size but that causes big slowdowns. Regards
Intel chips have always been slow at various things, they've always just done better with clock cycles. A memorable example of this was the LOOP opcode on pentium chips. It was very slow on Intel machines, so programs used it as a timing delay. On AMD chips it was extremely fast (1 cycle IIRC), so those timing loops effectively became noops causing lots of programs to fail in amusing and/or spectacular fashion.
lol theres good reason for not using things for purposes other than intended sometimes :) Would've loved to see the expresions on the faces of the guys at intel as they came across stuff like that. Still every choice has its tradeoffs.